Random charts - curbing immigration

Source: Vote Results 

The cantonal breakdown of the vote, unsurprisingly la Suisse francophone voted against... plus Zurich, Zug, and Basel-Stadt.

Press release of the Federal Authorities of the Swiss Confederation: "The Swiss population has adopted a popular initiative aimed at stopping mass immigration. This brings with it a change of system in Switzerland’s immigration policy. The new constitutional provisions require that immigration be restricted by means of quantitative limits and quotas. The Federal Council will set to work on implementing these without delay. 

The new constitutional provisions require that residence permits for foreign nationals be restricted using quantitative limits and quotas. These limits and quotas will apply to all permits covered by legislation on foreign nationals, including cross-border commuters and asylum seekers, and must be geared towards Switzerland’s overall economic interests. Businesses must give Swiss nationals priority when hiring staff. 

The new constitutional text does not specify how high these quotas should be, nor does it specify who should set and allocate them and according to what criteria. These details now need to be defined at the legislative level. The new constitutional provisions stipulate that the Federal Council and parliament have three years to implement the new system"

Two posters in favor of the measure, one against:

 

 

Swiss Vote to Curb Immigration in Referendum
Swiss vote to set limits on immigration from EU
Swiss agree to curb immigration and rethink EU deal

Random picture - Geneva

Random pictures - Lausanne

Random picture

Source: bala i ratt...

Nouvelle provocation de la droite populiste en Suisse:

L'UDC, notoirement xénophobe, a reconnu être à l'origine d'une mystérieuse campagne publicitaire qui fait scandale dans le sud du pays. On y voit un Roumain et un Italien - représentés par des rats - grignotant un fromage helvétique.

L'UDC, le parti de droite populiste suisse, notoirement xénophobe, a avoué vendredi être à l'origine d'une mystérieuse campagne publicitaire assimilant Roumains et Italiens à des rats grignotant un fromage helvétique, qui provoque depuis plusieurs jours un scandale dans le Tessin (sud).

La soixantaine d'affiches placardées depuis lundi dans le canton frontalier de l'Italie montrent trois rats à la mine patibulaire, représentant Bogdan, un voleur roumain, Fabrizio, un carreleur italien, ainsi qu'un certain Giulio, avocat qui n'est autre que le ministre italien des Finances, Giulio Tremonti. Avec cette nouvelle campagne, l'UDC entend dénoncer - en substance - l'«invasion» de plus de 40.000 travailleurs frontaliers italiens dans le Tessin ainsi que «la criminalité importée».

The notoriously xenophobic UDC (party) admitted being behind a mysterious ad campaign that is scandalizing the south. On it (the campaign) you see an Italian and a Romanian - represented by rats - nibbling on a Swiss cheese.

The UDC, the notoriously xenophobic, right-wing populist Swiss party, admitted Friday being at the origin of a mysterious advertising campaign likening Italians and Romanians to rats nibbling at a Swiss cheese, which has been causing a scandal for several days in (the canton of ) Ticino (south).

Around sixty posters plastered since Monday in the canton that borders Italy show three sinister-looking rats, representing Bogdan, a Romanian thief, Fabrizio, an Italian tile-layer, and a certain Giulio, a lawyer who turns out to be is none other than Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti. With this new campaign, the SVP intends to attack the "invasion" of the more than 40,000 Italians who cross the border to work in Ticino, as well as "imported criminality."

Lire la suite... Read the rest.

Note: The SVP/CDU (Schweizerische Volkspartei, or Swiss People's Party, also known as L'Union Démocratique du Centre, the Democratic Union of the Center) is the same group that became notorious for its posters in favor of the anti-minaret referendum that passed in Switzerland in November 2009, see the previous blog entry 'Direct democracy in action' for some of the posters they used...

Direct democracy in action

Switzerland held a number of referenda on November 29th. The better-known (indeed, fairly notorious) referendum was the one that proposed forbidding the construction of minarets... This one has reverberated around Europe and the world, and was passed by the Swiss with 57.47 per cent voting for the ban. Only four cantons had a majority against the ban - three of the Suisse Romande cantons (Geneve, Vaud, and Neuchatel) and Basel-City...

A referendum that created much fewer waves was the one that proposed prohibiting the export of arms, and it was defeated by a wide margin (see map of results below).

This blog entry will not be discussing the factors that caused the results, the ramifications of the outcomes of the votes, etc., but will very briefly look at some of the posters used in favor of, and against, the proposition (see below). Clearly the 'anti-minaret' forces won the 'battle of the posters.' The "pro-ban" posters had much more powerful imagery; the "anti-ban" posters were reduced to ridiculing and denigrating those who favored the ban (casting them as delirious or as xenophobes...). This is not to say that the posters caused the outcome, that is entirely the responsibility of those who cast their votes in favor of the referendum. However, from the marketing standpoint the 'anti-minaret' forces clearly carried the day.

posters in favor of the ban:

posters against the ban:

The second referendum, this one a proposal to ban the export of arms, was voted down by 68.2 per cent, with no cantons voting in favor. The posters used in favor of this ban implicitly acknowledged, by their use of very similar imagery, the 'strength' of the anti-minaret visual message (see below).

It is true that any initiative that contains or banks on anti-foreigner sentiment starts off with close to a solid forty percent or more of support, and one can generally count on Swiss parochialism in this matter .. who can forget the "For more security" posters that were used the last time a referendum to restrict the numbers of foreigners failed to pass (but not by all that much), see below:

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Graffiti

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Seeing the unexpected..

Picture credit: CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a scientific experiment, conducted on a very large scale! The world's largest particle accelerator will speed protons along a 17-mile circular loop built underground (by Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border) cooled to 1.7 degrees Kelvin at up to 99.999991 percent of the speed of light before smashing them into each other. By reproducing conditions similar to those present at the "Big Bang" (the theoretical beginnings of the universe) scientists hope to: shed light on subatomic particles; perhaps see the elusive 'Higgs boson'; perhaps create micro "black holes"; perhaps get proof of string theory; perhaps get data that will help understand the make-up of dark matter; etc., etc.

The article linked below points out an aspect of the LHC that is perhaps not the first thing one would think about - "... Almost just as interesting, though, is the massive computer network CERN has set up to evaluate the prodigious quantities of data the LHC will produce. Called the LHC Grid, the network will encompass some 60,000 computers around the world in order to leverage enough computer power to go through the 15 petabytes of information LHC experiments will produce each year. "You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," Ian Bird, who heads up the LHC Grid project, told the Associated Press. Within those billions of pixels -- collected by a multitude of ultra-sensitive sensors within the tunnel -- might be a few that show minimal evidence of a new sub-atomic particle...."

Bottom line: a giant crap shoot that may result in a quantum leap in man's understanding of the universe, or a $9.2 billion boondoggle... "What I would like to see is the unexpected," Gerardus t'Hooft, a physicist at the University of Michigan, told Reuters. "Perhaps the LHC will show us things we didn't know existed."

The Controversial Search for the God Particle

Alarmist YouTube video:

Another (with great production values!)

Updated 09/09:
Hawking bets CERN mega-machine won't find 'God's Particle'

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